Selected Poems
Thomas Lux
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
After starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux 'drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui.' The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. He uses humour or satire 'to help combat the darkness… to make the reader laugh - and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.'
Each of Lux's multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. 'Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,' says Lux, 'a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he's goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.'
‘…Lux’s characteristic strengths: a mixture of poignancy, humour, the sort of detail that makes his best work tonally complex and emotionally strong, as well as inviting in its skilful use of sound, imagery, line, stanza - mostly some form of conversational free verse - and a diction that is, in Marianne Moore’s words, “plain American which cats and dogs can read”.’ - Beverley Bie Brahic,Guardian
‘Bloodaxe, which today has probably the country’s most exciting international list, also publishes the American Thomas Lux’sSelected Poems. Lux, relatively neglected in the UK hitherto, is a wonderful, ardent and emotionally intelligent poet. Somewhere - but a long way, after Raymond Carver - his poems are urgent with human difficulty, and with understanding.’ - Fiona Sampson,Independent(Poetry Books of the Year)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although generally less well known here than Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva is counted by some critics as the greatest of these four major poets of postrevolutionary Russia. However, as veteran translator McDuff indicates in his introduction, the sounds of Russian poetrywhich to this day remains formally traditional in its use of rhyme and metercan never be captured in English. Further, Tsvetaeva presents a particularly difficult problem to the translator because her transcendent reputation rests precisely on the aural values of her verse. That said, McDuff must be congratulated for his brave attempt to reproduce those formal qualities. If we cannot have Tsvetaeva herself, these stand on their own as creditable English-language poems. The selection represents the entire scope of her remarkable career from her simple and charming early lyrics, first published in 1910 when she was 18, through those recounting her privations and hardships during the years of upheaval in Russia, to the poignant poems written in exile after 1922. It includes all her major long poems, such as the stunning Poem of the End. Although it is unclear whether Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized on her own account or because of the political actions of her husband Sergey Efron, her poems are heart-rending in view of her tragic life and eventual suicide. Love, the loss of youth, poetry and the Motherland are the core subjects of her poems, which are infused with high passion and a heroic tenacity of spirit. For non-Russian speakers, this volume is a new window on poetry in the Stalinist era.
